Content marketing based on an effective content marketing strategy can be a great way to drive sales through driving traffic to your website or landing page, to build brand awareness and to demonstrate your authority and expertise.
Or it can be time and money down the drain.
Without a properly thought out strategy for your content and without regular monitoring, your efforts are likely to tend to the latter. If you post and hope, you will depend on luck: luck in the right person seeing your content at the right time.
But before we look at how we develop our content marketing strategy, let us look first of all at why content marketing is effective.
There is no better place to start than with the book written by Marcus Sheridan, “They ask, You Answer.”
Sheridan argues back in 2017 that the lines between sales and marketing are now so blurred that there is little difference between the two. 70% of buying decisions are made before a prospect talks to the seller.
With the move online, most buyers will take the decision to purchase without being sold to. It is now marketing rather than selling that drives the purchase.
Sheridan had been a partner in a fibreglass swimming pool business for 9 years or so before the 2008 financial crash. That crash left the business on the point of collapse. He developed a new marketing system where he identified the questions that potential customers might ask, and provided the answers on their website. He generated 100 questions in a night of brainstorming and then he and his team would pump out articles and posts which addressed those questions.
The result was that the company built up a reservoir of trust with their audience, and the orders flowed in.
They Ask, You Answer. It sounds so simple and so logical, particularly in the digital age. If you want to buy a swimming pool, what do you do? Go to a show room or go to Google? You decide what you want to buy from where based on the research you carry out online before you approach a seller.
When Sheridan began teaching his methods he would often be met with objections like “Sounds good, Marcus, and applies to swimming pools, but not to my business.” What business would it not apply to now? Very few if any. If you think that it does not apply to your business, have another look, but this time from the perspective of your customer.
It goes without saying that you have to be answering the right questions, the questions that your customers ask, not the questions that you want them to ask.
Marketing Overwhelm
How can a small business or solopreneur keep up with the flood of marketing opportunities or channels?
SEO, blogs, video, podcasts, social media, email marketing, brand awareness, and the list goes on.
Do you use Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest? YouTube or TikTok. How many times should you be tweeting?
All of these marketing channels require content, and content requires careful planning to be successful.
If you want a very detailed approach, you could have a look at a very full on article, an ultimate article, from Semrush https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-strategy-guide/
But do you have time to attend to all of this marketing AND run your business? Do you really have the budget as a small or new business to pay someone to join all these dots? If so, lucky you!
If, like me, you find it all a little overwhelming and that leads you to do nothing, or to be inconsistent in your content production, despair not, because I hope that this article will give you some reassurance.
We don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to achieve market domination by next month. In fact, we don’t have to be worry about what our competition are doing at all. But we should have an effective marketing strategy.
A quote that really resonated with me recently came from digital marketer that 2022 is going to be a year of resonance rather than reach.
What does that really mean?
One customer
If instead we stopped worrying about having a massive following and thousands of likes, we concentrated on satisfying just one customer, would that make the task ahead feel a little less daunting?
Think of a client that would really benefit from what you do. How would you answer the questions that that one client would ask? How would you impress him or her.
What we are really doing is going back to basics of “They ask, You Answer” but making it relevant to the resources of our business. As a small business, you know about the dangers of taking on too much work and overstretching yourself. Exactly the same principles apply to your marketing.
So let’s ask ourselves some basic questions
- Who do we want to read our content?
- What problem of theirs will we be solving?
If we can’t answer those two questions, we need to stop until we can. If the who is not served by our what, we will find it difficult to attract anyone to us. They may have a series of questions so we can plan our content to answer those questions in a series of posts.
Content marketing is about attracting people to us instead of our chasing them for something that they may not want.
- What makes you unique? Why should your customer buy from you rather than your competition?
This is a difficult question for many of us to answer. For example, if you are a lawyer, or an accountant, what makes your service better than anyone else? Oh, you are an expert and are transparent on costs so that you give good value for money? So claims every other lawyer or accountant.
One simple answer is that the content on your website can be unique, particularly if it addresses the needs of the client rather than just talking about your services.
- What channels will you use to produce your content?
There are so many, but for the small business, we have to focus on a few, but do them well. There are two factors that you should consider
- What type of content is that one client you are seeking to attract likely to consume
- What type of content do you like to produce
If you are marketing to lawyers, Tik Tok might not be the best format to use. If you are selling to a younger market, then text heavy posts are unlikely to be attractive and you might look at Instagram or TikTok.
If you don’t enjoy making videos, are you going to be able to enthuse your audience? You should only use channels that you enjoy creating content for.
It is important to adopt a multi-channel approach rather than rely on any one channel. We have so little control over algorithms and social media channels that we need to be prepared for one to dip and another to rise over time. Adopting a multichannel approach means we are protected to some extent from the vagaries of the market. We can also extend our reach. We can repurpose our material to use on different channels, so that, for example, the images you use on your blog can also be used on your Instagram page. Or the image on your Instagram page might illustrate a problem that can be solved by the link to your website or your post.
- How often, and who is going to produce it?
Consistency is important when it comes to marketing, so how often should you post?
Marcus Sheridan and his partners were posting at least once a day. Neil Patel posts once a week. Even once a week is a stretch for the small business/solopreneur.
But another point to bear in mind is the sheer number of blogs and blog posts. There are literally billions of blogs over the world. According to Neil Patel, there are more blog posts about auto insurance than there are insurance contracts being issued. If you are not going to be lost in a sea of posts, quality is far more important than quantity. Resonance rather than reach.
My recommendation for a small business, the solopreneur or the new business is to aim for once a month. You can always increase it if you find that you have the time.
And who is going to produce the content? If you can, share it out among the people in the business. It invests them in your website. If their writing skills are poor, you can always edit and amend it, but let them come up with the basic idea.
If you are going to use a content writer, expect the writer to take a little time to come up with your voice, and to get to know your business, what it does and how it helps your customer. This takes time, and who is going to pay for that time?
The frequency and other costs associated with creating consistent content should be dictated by your budget, not the budget that the experts and gurus say you should run. But there is a time and cost, and you need to factor that into your budgets for the year. If you have not already budgeted for it, do so once you’ve finished reading this article. Or get left behind. Because you can be sure that your competitors will be improving on their content and your customers will be searching for it.
The ROI
If we are talking about cost we should also be talking about return on investment. What do you get for your money, apart from people telling you that it is a long game and not to expect immediate results?
Which can be true, particularly if your goals are limited.
Let’s start with establishing what you want your content to do.
- It goes without saying that you want it to improve your sales figures. Sheridan talks about one post creating $500,000 in sales. If those are your expectations, it’s time to have a reality check.
Your content needs to be good to persuade anyone to buy. It then needs to be found by someone who needs or wants to buy what you are selling.
The starting point is that the customer must need what you are selling. If he doesn’t need it, he or she will not have typed in a query into that Google Search bar. What was the question they asked? Does your content answer that query, quickly?
We need to look at how many sales you want to achieve, and then work backwards to see how we are going to achieve that figure through the content you produce.
- The customer is unlikely to buy from you unless they trust you. You can of course have reviews and testimonials, social proof, to help, but in this day where so many reviews are fake, is that enough to engender trust?
Perhaps not.
So your content marketing strategymust establish your credentials as someone that the customer can trust. Sheridan quotes the example of a car company that produces content about the problems involved with buying a second hand car and possible solutions. Yes, it might put some people off from buying, but everyone else trusts in them because they can see that the company is putting the needs of the customer first. Demonstrating how you do that is so much more effective than a bland statement saying “We put the customer at the heart of everything we do,” as so many websites proclaim.
- Does your customer know everything that he or she needs to know about your service or the goods you provide? If for example you sell cameras, the probability is that the customer does not know everything about the camera that they are about to buy, nor will they go through the manual. But you can show them the possibilities and how to achieve them. Your content can inspire your customers to want to be a better photographer, so that you are no longer just a salesman, you are now a teacher, their friend.
The goals of your content strategy will be unique to your business, but they should include a measure of increasing sales, improving brand awareness, building trust and educating your customer.
Reach
You’ve written a brilliant post, created some stunning imagery, shot your compelling video, so how now do you ensure that it is read? I will write about this topic in more detail in subsequent posts so will only give an overview here.
- SEO :
If you have accurately identified the one customer you are targeting, you know his pain points and the problems he needs to solve, you will by default have a list of questions that he will be asking, and those can form the basis of the keywords you need in your content. If you don’t have those keywords in front of you, that may be a sign that you need to look again at this exercise.
Organic reach is wonderful, it’s free, but you are competing against the thousands of other posts that have been written, so firstly it takes a little time for Google to sit up and take notice, and secondly, you need to give it a bit of a push.
- Social Media. There is probably a link button from your website to your social media, so the post you create should be shared to your social media, if not the whole post, enough of it to attract anyone reading it to read the full article on your website. The reach on most social media is now almost negligible unless you are prepared to pay, but the cost is not great and the targeting options are good, so be prepared to put down a small budget, even £10 a month to boost some of your posts. You can always increase the budget as you get more experienced, or pay someone to do it for you.
- Email Signature : Why not include a link to your article with every email you send?
- If you have an email list, email everyone on it. If you don’t have an email list, now you have a reason to have one.
Conclusion
We have covered:
- Who we are going to be marketing to: one identified person
- What they want to read: the answers to their problems
- How they want to consume it : blog post, video, podcast, image
- When they want to consume it : how often will you produce your content
- Who will produce it
- What you want your content to achieve : what are your goals
- How will you distribute your content: SEO, social media, emails etc
We have just thing left to do: DOCUMENT IT.
Like every plan, it needs to be documented so that you and anyone working with you can follow it and stick to it.
You will also find as you go along that you need to revise it, take bits out and add bits in. You will need to react to events with your content. Travel agents now will be writing as much about hygiene and social distancing in hotels as they will be about the number of restaurants and the gym because that is what their customers are want to know about now. Hopefully in time the emphasis will return to food and exercise rather than sanitation stations, in which case the content will change again.
There is a lot of work involved in putting together an effective content marketing strategy. That strategy will be the foundations of the work carried on throughout the year and therefore needs to be solid. A fresh pair of eyes from outside the business, looking into it from the perspective of a customer can be invaluable.
If you need help with putting in the foundations of your content strategy, please get in touch.
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